Late Seventeenth Century Research Articles

Melis Taner, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in its Illustrated Manuscripts

Reviewed by: Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts by Melis Taner Guy Burak Melis Taner, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 210 pp. Hardback, $154. ISBN: 978-90-04-41269-9. Remarkably little attention has been paid to the history of the Ottoman frontier province of Baghdad from its conquest in 1534 through the eighteenth century. This historiographical gap is intriguing. It may be attributed, at least in part, to the difficulty in classifying this province in the historiographical scheme that has shaped specialization within Ottoman studies. In the very rough classification of the Ottoman Empire's provinces, which to a large extent follows the modern nationalist categories, the province of Baghdad is typically described as one of the Arab provinces. Ottoman sources, too, often refer to it as Arab Iraq rather than "Persian Iraq" (ʿIraḳ-i ʿacem). However, this classification of Baghdad as Arab fails to account for the multiple connections that shaped the province's history. Over the course of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, Baghdad changed hands between the Ottomans and the Safavids, a situation Evliya Çelebi compared to a person caught in a whirlwind. The province was also connected to the Indian Ocean, the Levant, and Anatolia. Additionally, the province was home to a large Shiʿi population and famous for numerous important Shi'i and Sunni shrines. Melis Taner's richly documented and nuanced Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts successfully fills a major historiographical gap in the history of pre-modern Baghdad by examining an idiosyncratic body of mostly Turkish and Persian manuscripts that were compiled and illustrated in the province in the decade that followed the 1590 Treaty of Constantinople between the [End Page 338] Ottomans and the Safavids. Several scholars have noticed and analyzed the corpus's distinctive visual idiom (occasionally referred to as the "Baghdad school"). While building on these scholars' work, Taner elegantly uses these manuscripts to narrate the cultural history of the province and, indeed, the Ottoman and the Safavid empires in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This unique textual and artistic production in the province of Baghdad overlapped with the emergence of a market for these manuscripts and single-page illustrations. The position of the province between the Ottoman and the Safavid empires created fairly unique opportunities for governors and local power brokers to amass political power and wealth, both crucial to the patronage of scholars, poets, and illustrators as well as architectural projects in the province and elsewhere. Moreover, certain governors and local chieftains took advantage of the distance from the imperial centers of Istanbul and Isfahan to promote their political claims. The texts they commissioned helped them articulate these claims at the provincial and imperial levels. The liminal position of the province is also reflected in the visual idiom of the manuscripts, which is in conversation with—but also distinct from—those evolving in the Ottoman and Safavid imperial capitals. Caught in a Whirlwind meticulously explores the dynamics between the Ottoman imperial center, the province of Baghdad, and the Safavid court across different works and genres. A universal history, titled Cāmiʿü's-Siyer, which was composed for the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, Sokulluzade Hasan Paşa, is a case in point. Hasan Paşa employed an Ottoman courtly genre to highlight his lineage and vizierial role. While emphatically engaging with an imperial genre, the work also served the governor to legitimize his rule and acts in the province. Other works, such as Fuzuli of Baghdad's Ḥadā'iḳü's-Süʿedā, a popular work on the Karbala tragedy, or the hagiographical works devoted to Sufi masters and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, were primarily read by local Bektashi and Mevlevi circles in the province (although copies of these works found their way to Istanbul and other provinces as well). In other instances, compilations produced in Baghdad, such as the genealogical treatise (silsilanāma) studied in the book's fifth chapter, were made for Safavid patrons...

“These Lusting, Incestuous, Perverse Creatures”

AbstractThis article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on influential British and a few less well-known German texts. Positioned as a specifically phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, it demonstrates with the help of literature how plants have been shaping human culture—in this context, the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Moving from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” to concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire, this history ultimately arrives at queer reproduction and pleasure as a collective endeavor.

An Ottoman Imperial City in Transition: Transformation of Urban Governance in Edirne (18th -19th Centuries)

Modern historiography has a consensus over Edirne’s well-established socio-spatial and political position that reached its peak during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this period, the city gained a de facto capital status as consecutive Ottoman sultans permanently resided in Edirne. While the physical presence of the Ottoman sultans and imperial institutions in Edirne brought about a spatial and demographic stability to the city until the late eighteenth century, Edirne witnessed major transformations through new imperial implementations throughout the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the new reforms brought about the proportional participation of city dwellers in the city’s governance, including the non-Muslims. Based on Ottoman archival sources and Muslim court registers of Edirne, the present paper investigates how the reforms of the nineteenth century transformed this “imperial city” vis-à-vis its urban governance. The paper suggests that in the nineteenth century Edirne was not the same imperial city governed in a more autonomous way in the eighteenth century anymore. However, while centralization efforts meant that military, administrative and financial responsibilities in the administration of provinces were converged, now as a provincial center, Edirne maintained its position in the Tanzimat era when a more participatory system in this ethno-religiously diverse city formed.

‘From Mozambique in Indies of Portugal’

Abstract Between the mid-sixteenth and late-seventeenth centuries, a minority of enslaved people in Spanish America came from the western Indian Ocean world. Europeans trafficked “Mozambiques” into central Mexico as early as the 1540s, but the terms connecting people to Eastern Africa remained nebulous to imperial authorities. Changeable and malleable, terms like “mozambique” or “cafre de pasa” circulated widely and developed layers of meaning as enslaved people moved among the port cities of the Iberian empires. These vocabularies of difference associated Blackness with the Indo-Pacific in Mexican historical documents. Tracing the experiences of enslaved people of East African origins in Mexico complicates the conflation of Blackness, slavery, and Atlantic Africa. Before the eighteenth century, historical sources point to an overlapping of categories denoting Africanness and Asianness in Mexico.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson

Reviewed by: Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson Karin Wulf Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. By Jessica Marie Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Three maps precede the Introduction to Wicked Flesh: “New Orleans’ Atlantic World, circa 1685–1810”; “The Gulf Coast and the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century”; and “Senegambia,” adapted from a 1718 map. These cartographic renderings illustrate the breadth of space and time covered in Jessica Marie Johnson’s important book, but it is her intellectual and historiographical wayfinding that best lead us through it. To pursue subjects such as intimacy and freedom—which have recently gained velocity in historical scholarship, along with topics with longer trajectories such as Atlantic slavery and comparative imperial contexts—Johnson centers the historical experience of African and African-descended women. Her work—drawing inspiration and method from historically minded literary scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Hortense J. Spillers, historians such as Marisa J. Fuentes and Jennifer L. Morgan, and abundant recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, and empire—is a remarkable testament to her own research and powers of explication and evocation. At the same time, it brilliantly reveals how scholars are reframing the histories of empire and the violence of slavery around the categories of family and kinship.1 This work has accentuated the contours of imperial biopolitics, illuminating the centrality of intimate relationships to the project of empire by highlighting imperial officials’ voracious appetites for regulating family relations and structures, and above all women’s reproductive sexuality. But Johnson’s argument about how Black women— from Africa into broader Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean— defined and prioritized freedom for their bodies, their kin, and their futures is the most stunning achievement of the book. Johnson opens each of the book’s chapters with individual women’s stories, moving from Senegal to Louisiana and sweeping through the most [End Page 667] dramatic and traumatic phenomena of the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century along the Gulf Coast: Indigenous resistance and revolt, the intensification of transatlantic slavery, and the shifting of imperial power from the French to the Spanish. These stories show how thoroughly the Middle Passage recast race and gender in a violently hierarchical order. The first tells of Seignora Catti, the African widow of a Portuguese trader and herself a merchant and enslaver, hosting a business dinner at her home in Rufisque in the west of Senegal in the 1680s. Next is Marie Baude, a free, propertied Senegambian woman who testified in 1724 before French Compagnie des Indes officials in the trial of her husband, a gunsmith, accused of murdering a man who had threatened to rape her at their home in Fort Saint-Louis. The husband was imprisoned in France and then deported to New Orleans, and when Marie arrived in Louisiana four years later, the company stripped her of her property, including enslaved people, claiming that she owed the cost of their collective transport on a ship with other slaves. Then chapter 4 begins in New Orleans with the story of Suzanne, who moved out of the city in 1725 to land that the Compagnie des Indes granted to her husband, along with his freedom and his permission to rent her from the company. Next is Charlotte, who, as a fugitive from her enslaver—who was also her father—was arrested in 1751 as she waited to beg a hearing with Madame de Vaudreuil, the wife of the governor. Finally, Johnson turns to María Teresa, a free woman of color who, when the father of her children passed away in 1789, made a legal claim against his sister Perine—another free woman of color—for withholding property that María claimed belonged to her children. Perine responded by contesting the children’s paternity and successfully held on to the property; when Perine died in 1816, her heir, a goddaughter named Silvaine, petitioned to control it. Each of the women centered in this book pursued a vision of freedom with creativity and tenacity. In Johnson’s hands, their strategies contextualized within histories...

Flavius Josephus and early modern biblical chronology

ABSTRACT This paper examines the manner in which the early modern scholarly debate concerning the true age of the world was shaped by philological and text-critical scholarship on the work of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Traditionally, historians have earmarked the late seventeenth century as a time of uncertainty and crisis for biblical chronologists, as scholars became increasingly aware of corruptions within existing versions of scripture and of the manner in which scriptural chronology was contradicted by pagan sources. I hope to show how, in response to these doubts, scholars during this period also developed a pronounced interest in the chronology – and consequently the textual history – of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, whom scholars considered the oldest and therefore best surviving witness to the original state of the biblical text in the time of the Apostles. I have drawn two important conclusions from this development. Firstly, I show that the development of philological and text-critical scholarship on non-biblical texts was a direct result of theological issues relating to biblical authority and chronology. Secondly, I argue that this philological scholarship was key to undermining orthodox faith in the stability and reliability of the biblical text itself.

Mana Kia. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

Mana Kia. <i>Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism</i>

Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby

Reviewed by: Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby Jeffery Moser Blair Hoxby, editor. Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason. Ohio State UP, 2022. 328 p. Stanford professor Blair Hoxby's newest editorial production is a multi-author volume that considers the theory and practice of tragedy produced during Europe's Age of Reason, that intellectual and philosophical period promulgated during the late-seventeenth century and early- to mid-eighteenth century. Hoxby has an impressive record of research and publishing about European literature and culture. This text continues his theoretical approach to refigure and reassess traditional views about tragedy's power, versification, and imparts from classical beginnings during the Enlightenment, between 1685 and 1815, and beyond. For any student of history and literature, it is worth remembering that plays written and performed in the late-seventeenth century and after were post-Shakespeare's lifetime, post-Civil War, and post-Interregnum for England. With the public staging of plays licensed to reopen in 1660 after eighteen years of closure, not only did English theatre undergo a restoration, but so did England and the whole British Isles on an expansive socio-political scale, leading up to the Act of Union, which went into effect in the spring of 1707. The act created the Kingdom of Great Britain. Right on these heels followed political restoration and reform afoot in Europe, too, resulting in changes and adjustments. With Napoleon Bonaparte's dethronement in 1814, most of Europe was challenged to determine a new path forward. Events like another French Revolution or Russian conquest occurring again suddenly seemed to be impossibilities. The boundaries of European countries were renegotiated and seemingly settled, and the United States was well on its way to dominating Western ideals about democracy and sovereignty, while Imperial England's colonial grasp around the globe began to wane and fade. So it was, in many ways, that literature and culture during the late seventeenth-century and early- to mid-eighteenth century found itself in the crosshairs of optimism and pessimism. This is a particular prong that Hoxby stresses about tragedy, arguing in the introduction [End Page 333] that tragedy found itself at a "crossroads of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment" (1). In other words, tragedies of the time were caught between the expectations of doom and gloom of classical Greek and Roman tragedy traditions and the "optimism, reason, and a faith in human progress and productivity" still regarded today as the majority assessment that scholars associate with the Enlightenment. Hence, for Hoxby, and others who have contributed to this volume, the tragedy of this time must be seen to "teeter on the brink of paradox" (1). In this accord, the essays affirm that the scope of tragedy written and performed during this time was both expansive and transitional. It should not be easily categorized as stale or a noncontroversial accoutrement to the period, nor a genre that was subjugated to something less and not as entertaining, edgy, or discursive as its counterpart of comedy that rose in popularity among the masses during the Restoration. Instead, tragedy of this time must be newly seen and understood as "dynamic" and "paradoxical," experimenting and juggling classical, early modern, romantic, and emerging modern ideals and expectations about the genre. In addition to Hoxby, scholars contributing to this worthwhile academic collection include: Alex Eric Hernandez, Logan J. Connors, James Harriman-Smith, Russ Leo, Cecile Dudouyt, Adrian Daub, Stefan Tilg, Larry F. Norman, Joseph Harris, and Joshua Billings. Their essays are categorized into three relevant sections: Part 1-- Ancient Forms, Modern Affects; Part II – Philosophy, Religion, and the Institutions of Tragedy, and Part III – Ancients, Moderns, and the Historical Turn. Hoxby's own essay, "Joanna Baillie, the Gothic Bard, and Her Tragedies of Fear," concludes the first section. The Scottish poet and dramatist's books of verse and plays reveal her extensive study and critical appreciation of Shakespeare, especially the Bard's proficiency in the passions. Baillie's (1762-1851) tragedy of fear, Orra, is set "in the context of the critical reinvention of Shakespeare as a primitive genius whose mastery of the...

The Cultural Transformation of the Trope of the Renegade in Late Seventeenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century English Drama

This article examines the transformation of the trope of the renegade character in late seventeenth-and early nineteenth-century English drama, as represented by John Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1689) and its adaptation by Frederick Reynolds as The Renegade (1812). Reynolds adopts the trope of Restoration ‘cultural renegade’, or what I call ‘Restoration gone cultural revolutionary protagonist’, to reflect on the military alliance between England of George III and the Oriental Muslims in Egypt in 1801 against their common enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte. The renegade character in the plays of Dryden and Reynolds transcends religious limitations of the negative connotations of betrayal and fosters cross-cultural interactions.

Authorship in Female Disguise: Love in Distress; or, The Lucky Discovery. A Novel Written by the Honourable Lady * * *

:Love in Distress; or, The Lucky Discovery (1697) is fundamentally concerned with the effects of concealment and revelation. Even though it was published with no authorial attribution, the reader was told that it had been written "By the honourable Lady * * *," thus creating tension between anonymity and disguised female authorship. The sense of concealment created by the use of pseudonyms, initials and references in the prefatory material is echoed by the facts that three of the female characters in the story cross-dress, thus hiding their identity, and that some male characters also use various kinds of disguises. In addition to this, the story is plotted through a series of well-kept secrets that are eventually revealed to create a happy and lucky ending. The tightly built plot, some elements of which are taken from the stage, and the psychological insight it offers into the feelings of some of the characters make this novel a representative and singularly interesting exemplum of the genre in the late seventeenth century.

Front Cover

Next article FreeFront CoverPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTop: Jean-François Cousinet, candelabrum, Stockholm, 1695. Silver; 52 cm high. Royal Collection, Stockholm. © The Royal Court, Sweden/photo Alexis Daflos. Middle: Mahren family cabinet and memorial card album, late 1880s or early 1890s. Cotton velvet, ivory or celluloid, and paper; 11 × 8 ½ in. Private collection, San Francisco. Photo courtesy Randy Dodson. Bottom: Ambroise Duval (d. 1683) (founder), after Claude Ballin (designer), vase with handles decorated with lions’ heads, Paris, late seventeenth century. Bronze; 119.5 × 91 × 75 cm. Versailles, châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MR3423. © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Didier Saulnier. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 29, Number 2Fall–Winter 2022 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725980 © 2022 The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction: Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception

Introduction:Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception Sonia Villegas-López This special issue approaches Restoration prose fiction from the perspective of literary genre, suggesting that there is more than meets the eye when reading and interpreting the narrative texts that were published in England in the late seventeenth century.1 The term that best illustrates these fictional experiments is "variety": of origins, forms, styles and topics. Part of this variety is due to its transnational nature, as some of the articles in this issue demonstrate. Indeed, it could be argued that the early novel in English was the repository in which different European and non-European traditions converged. Mainly French models, but also Italian, Spanish, and to a lesser degree eastern influences contributed to create the diversity of prose fiction in this period. A survey of the titles of printed fiction between 1660 and 1700 suggests that there were no unifying criteria for what the form was, and the same evidence can also be used to study the multiplicity of texts that attracted the attention of the growing readership of the Restoration: romances, versions of nouvelle historique and nouvelle galante, epistolary narratives, allegorical and political fictions, secret histories and oriental tales among them.2 The articles in this issue illustrate this variety of sources and origins that constitute the polyphonic nature of the early novel. Prose fiction has traditionally been considered the lay sister of the other Restoration genres, raising little interest among scholars of seventeenth-century literature until very recently. In particular, the study of the "origins of the novel" question since its early days in the 1950s repeatedly excluded the fiction of the Restoration with few exceptions, [End Page 3] precisely due to that fiction's lack of uniformity, its tendency to anonymity and its association with less prestigious forms. However, the situation has been reversed in recent years and renewed attention is being paid by critics to the workings of fictional genres and the cross-fertilization between literary forms which explain the development of the early novel. These studies include such influential works as Ros Ballaster's Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East, 1662–1786 (2005), Kate Loveman's Reading Fictions, 1660–1740 (2008), Gerd Bayer's Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2016), Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau's Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text & Transmission (2016), Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 (2017), and Leah Orr's Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 (2017). In these critical studies, Restoration printed fiction is addressed in its entirety and complexity. Their authors reject the "great authors" approach in favour of a more comprehensive analysis of the corpus as a whole, in the belief, as Bayer puts it, that Restoration fiction can be thought of as an archive of sorts, "a circumscript body of works that exist for later writers to build on or merely pillage from."3 In fact, translation, imitation, adaptation and plagiarism often recur in these early productions, providing an enthusiastic audience, thirsty for knowledge or just sheer entertainment, with a multitude of texts and editions to choose from. When looking at those texts, one is tempted to think that Restoration fiction evaded uniformity, purity and stability, which are actually features genres adopt to consolidate and compete among themselves. Yet the fact remains that authors who could effectively evade censorship benefitted from a degree of freedom to play with the new genre, since boundaries were not fixed. Restoration printed fiction also proved a fertile ground for other forms to expand and for genres to blend—verse, drama, and history, to name but a few—as Gabrielle Starr in Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (2004), Moreau and Glomsky's 2016 above-mentioned edition, or John McTague's Things that Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743 (2019) have shown. This tendency towards experimentation and genre instability, which could be applicable to the fiction of the whole seventeenth century, became even more acute during the Restoration, mainly due to the influence of specific cultural or political events, like the foundation of the...

Aeolian Geographies, Daily Life, and Empire Building in the English Caribbean

Knowledge of daily winds—gained from prolonged residence in the region—shaped life in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean. As colonists gathered, recorded, and deployed knowledge about breezes, winds, and gales, they learned the peculiar aeolian geographies of the Caribbean. In this maritime space, wind distorted distance. It took longer to sail one direction than the other. This article charts how colonists gradually adapted their economic, social, and material worlds to the rhythms of the winds. They came to realize that winds dictated sailing times, routed travel, scheduled commerce, and informed how and where colonists built structures, especially fortifications. It took even longer, though, for officials in London to grasp winds' power over daily life in—and the geography of—the Caribbean. Lack of lived experience in the Caribbean initially stymied metropolitan efforts to understand the region's climatic realities. Through continued correspondence with island residents throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, metropolitan officials learned the importance of aeolian knowledge to maritime affairs. As it circulated in letters, reports, and maps, this knowledge became crucial to the commercial and military success of the British Empire, especially as that empire expanded in the eighteenth century.

Between Misery and Reward: The Culture of Vigilance in the Experience of a Venetian Consul during the Early Modern Period

Consular participation in state surveillance did not seem to be the basis of the legitimacy of Venetian consuls in Izmir in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, their activity as informants did not contribute to producing the knowledge that was then used by those in power to make decisions, or to judge and punish illegal behaviour. By placing the Izmir consuls in a broader context in which the state rewarded the participation in a set of specific tasks of as many private individuals as possible, this article reassesses the oftendebated and much-contested efficacy of consular information activity. Rather than providing the Venetian authorities with reliable and indispensable information, this article argues that consular vigilance defined a bond of loyalty and mutual expectations between these consuls and Venice. Far from resulting in superior central control, political power projected its authority onto the narratives and behaviour of consuls and potential informers.

French Tyranny at School

In 1674, the Amsterdam publisher Jan Claesz ten Hoorn printed a new schoolbook, the Nieuwe Spiegel der Jeugd, of Franse Tiranny (New Mirror of Youth, or French Tyranny). The work, based on a chronicle of the recent ‘Disaster Year’ (1672), during which the Dutch Republic was invaded and nearly overrun by a French-led coalition, provided a concise but highly graphic and violent history of these turbulent events for the Dutch youth. The Nieuwe Spiegel became a run-away success, and was one of the most popular Dutch schoolbooks of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the production, content, circulation, use and legacy of the Nieuwe Spiegel, and situates the book in the broader context of the political, literary and pedagogical culture of the Dutch Republic. Based on a detailed bibliographical reconstruction, this article also includes an appendix listing the fifty-two editions that appeared between 1674 and 1780.

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

"Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women": White Women and the Barbadian Demographic Crisis, 1673–1715

In Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn used the 1680 census of Barbados to depict the island as a place where stunted population growth and brittle bonds of community plagued the island's white settler society. Dunn attributed Barbados's demographic disruption to low marriage and nuptiality rates. However, by reexamining population reports from Barbados between 1673 and 1715, "Greater Numbers of Fair and Lovely Women" reveals that low nuptiality and birth rates were symptoms of a greater problem: Barbados was hemorrhaging white men. Between 1673 and 1715, the number of white women and children on Barbados remained stable, while more than four thousand men drained from the colony. This new demographic analysis of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Barbados explores how white women came to form the foundation of their communities as white men left the island to seek new opportunities. Despite Barbados's reputation as a masculine and exploitative space largely bereft of the "civilizing" influence of white women and families, by the turn of the eighteenth century, the preservation of Barbados's settler society had fallen almost entirely to white women.

Practical Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Experience: Three Italian Surgeons and Their Observations

Abstract This article deals with early modern surgical case literature, more specifically with printed collections of observations in surgery. It examines the work of late seventeenth- to late eighteenth-century Italian practitioners from different backgrounds and of different statuses, and highlights the complexity of cognitive and social purposes pervading the genre, besides that of sharing empirical knowledge. These can be apprehended through a second look at texts and contexts, by analysing the ways in which authors selected, penned, and arranged their narratives. As the anthologies under examination show, collected observations varied significantly in focus and scope, with some seemingly designed to sustain the authoritative legacy of learned surgery, others defying a professional ethos for non-academic practitioners, and others still surveying ailments in light of hospital statistics. In fact, as this article suggests, the genre was flexible enough – and the narratives malleable enough – to adjust to changes in surgical theory and practice. In spite of new intellectual expectations, however, it was not plastic enough to take on new epistemic functions, such as reframing surgical nosology.

Intertextuality in Ethiopian Gǝ’ǝz Literature: The Lexical Relationships between the Hagiography and the Chronicle of King Iyasu I

This paper demonstrates the intertextual aspects of the hagiography and chronicle of an Ethiopian king, aṣe Iyasu I (r.1682–1706). To achieve this, lexical features of both texts are examined. These texts were written in the late seventeenth century. The chronicle of aṣe Iyasu I was written during the king’s reign by his own three chroniclers (Hawarya Krəstos, Zäwäldä Maryam, and Sinoda), while the hagiography of aṣe Iyasu I was written two years after the king’s death by azaž Sinoda. This study is based on textual methods of analysis, in particular content analysis. This method makes it possible to distinguish the lexical relationships between the two texts. For this purpose, the words and phrases that describe the royal courage and sacred personality of the king are identified. Although both the hagiography and the chronicle of aṣe Iyasu I are composed to the same king and address the subject of the same historical milieu, there is no remarkable lexical parallel between the two texts in the area of words and phrases. Unlike the chronicle of aṣe Iyasu I, the hagiography of aṣe Iyasu I uses carefully selected metaphoric words and phrases to describe the king’s bravery and sacred personality. It is thus reasonable to conclude that each author composed their text in a different literary setting rather than that one influenced the other. In other words, the two texts are interconnected but each developed its own textual features as a response to the method and approach of Ethiopian Gǝʿǝz literature.